Page 158 of Summer Love

The same way of getting down to the kids’ level, the same gentleness when they failed for the tenth time, the same laugh. I was nine when he died, but I remember his lessons: no one yelled, no one counted mistakes.

Except Tom would never have bet on a girl’s body.

My fingers tighten on the cutters.

Tom and Maggie. I know their story by heart. All of Coral Bay knows it. People tell it around campfires, the old-timers trot it out after one drink too many, and at the Walkers’, it came up often at the table.

Tom, the reigning world champion, met Maggie at a surf competition in Australia. Love at first sight—for him. Maggie wasn’t convinced, but she eventually agreed to dinner. Then they each went their separate ways. She told him it was better that way: she was Australian, he was American, she was twenty-five with a career she couldn’t afford to wreck.

Tom had gotten her number, though, and they started writing to each other. A few months later, another competition, a night together. Maggie made him promise they’d never see each other again. But they called every day.

At the WSL final in Los Angeles, Tom won. Maggie passed out during her heat and ended up unconscious in the water. Tom went with her to the hospital, passing himself off as her boyfriend. The doctors told them she was pregnant. He had to be the father.

He convinced her to come back to Coral Bay with him, and he married her. He ended his career at thirty and promised to help her get back to the top after the baby was born—Jace. He kept his word. Twice, even, because Noah came along two years later. Maggie had a strong finish to her career. They had eleven years together, then Tom died of colon cancer, a little more than a year after the diagnosis.

That’s a love story. Not perfect, not simple, but real. He chose to be with the woman he loved, he put their story ahead of the last stretch of his career, he kept his promise. It’s the start of a romance, at least. Because a romance ends well. Their story ended in a hospital bed.

My story doesn’t look like that.

My story is a boy who bet a hundred dollars he’d sleep with me, a night I believed in, an empty bed in the morning, and six years of silence. And now he looks at me the way he used to—and I don’t know if I can believe it, or if it’s just the grown-up version of the same trap.

On the sand, one of the kids jumps into Jace’s arms, and he catches him, lifts him, tickles him. The kid shrieks with laughter. Jace laughs too—a real laugh, head thrown back.

I look away.

Maybe it’s a love story.

I grip a piece of wire with the cutters and twist.

Or maybe not.

CHAPTER 50

Summer

THURSDAY

The bus is parked crooked by the board rack, engine hatch open. Jace is crouched behind it, hands buried in the engine. He’s wearing a T-shirt that was white this morning. Now it’s dirty gray, streaked with grease.

“How much more is this crap gonna cost me?” he says through gritted teeth.

He straightens, steps back, wipes his forehead with the back of his wrist. A dark smear clings above his eyebrow.

Flip’s lying in the shade of the van, muzzle between his paws, ears down.

I walk over. The sun beats down on the yard, on the rows of boards. The smell of gas is acrid, mixed with neoprene.

Jace looks up at me. Right away, his face lights up. Not a big smile—he’s too wiped out for that. But his shoulders drop and the crease between his eyebrows smooths out.

“I needed to see you right now,” he breathes. “I grabbed poke bowls from Luke’s this morning. They’re in the cooler.”

He nods toward the little blue cooler sitting in the shade of the building. He grabs a rag wedged in the back pocket of his shorts and wipes his hands. The grease doesn’t come off. It just smears.

He grunts, tosses the rag onto the rear bumper, and heads for the hose on the wall. He picks up the bar of black soap and scrubs his palms together under the stream. Gray water runs onto the sand. He comes back shaking water from his hands, then wipes them on his shorts.

We settle onto the wooden bench, under the tin roof. Jace opens the cooler, pulls out his water bottle, then the two paper bowls. Salmon, avocado, sushi rice, radish, edamame. He hands me a pair of chopsticks and a bottle of jasmine tea. Caught off guard, I look up at him.

I drank it all the time when we were teenagers. He didn’t forget.